Seven years on, Spain rattles tin cup at Google over Street View slurp Seven years after Google raised hackles by collecting information about Wi-Fi access points with its Street View fleet, Spain's privacy regulator has fined the company €300,000. The country's data protection agency, La Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD), announced the fine on November 7th, 2017. The privacy row …
The privacy row first arose in 2010, when people realised that Google's then-kinda-new StreetView photo-collection-mobiles were collecting the names, MAC addresses and locations of WiFi access points in homes and businesses.
I might be wrong, but I think that the big problem was not collecting the MAC addresses and locations of WiFi routers. It was that they were also recording whatever data was being sent over the networks.
Google was recording the locations of routers to make it easier for Android phones to find out where they are when they detect the same WiFi network, and this is something relatively uncontroversial which iPhones also do.
But they had no particular reason to record the data sent over the network, they didn't even know what to do with it, and it seems that they recorded it just because why not. That's the part that got them in trouble.
Google was recording the locations of routers to make it easier for Android phones to find out where they are when they detect the same WiFi network, and this is something relatively uncontroversial which iPhones also do.
...taking my router with me that will make a mockery of that particularly obnoxious freeloading means of location.
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